Mixing With Murder (9 page)

‘If you’re staying here, you’re a visitor to Oxford.’ He sounded smug.

Elementary, my dear Watson
, I snarled mentally. The house was a ruddy B and B. ‘So?’ I said aloud casually. ‘I’m a tourist.’

‘Like hell you are!’ he snapped. ‘You’ve come from London. Have you come from that creep Allerton?’

Oh shit, this was getting more complicated by the minute. It was beginning to look as if others knew far more about what was going on than I did.

‘Never heard of him!’ I said and shut the door on him before he could argue.

I sneaked into the breakfast parlour and peeped from the window. He could still barge after me, hammering on the door and demanding to speak to me. I held my breath. He hung about outside undecidedly for a minute and then strode away. I heaved a sigh of relief but it was only temporary. He’d gone but he’d turn up again. Right now he’d hurry home either to warn the Stallards or Lisa herself about me. But Lisa wasn’t there, he’d said, and certainly no one had answered the door. If I had to make a guess, and guess was all it could be, he wouldn’t say anything about me to the Stallards before he spoke to Lisa. He wouldn’t want to worry them unduly. He’d mentioned Mickey Allerton so he knew too much for my liking. But I didn’t know how much the Stallard parents knew about Lisa’s flight from the Silver Circle. I was ready to gamble they knew only some story she’d chosen to tell them and it wouldn’t necessarily be correct in every detail.

It’s called the Generation Gap. Basically it works like this. Young people don’t tell older ones what they’re doing because they don’t want endless lectures and interference. They excuse their actions by saying they are anxious to prevent their parents worrying.

Parents and other adult relatives play their cards close to the chest out of an instinct born of fear. They don’t know how their children will react to difficult news and how they, as adults, will deal with the reaction, when it comes. They hope that if they ignore the problem, it will go away. They persuade themselves they are protecting their children’s innocence. They pretend to one another that what they are doing is ‘for the best’.

When my mother left home no one told me she had gone for good. I mean, what did they think? That I wouldn’t notice she wasn’t there? I remember asking one evening as we sat down to supper, where was she? Dad looked glum and said nothing. Grandma ladled out goulash as if the survival of the Western world depended on it, and announced that my mother had gone on a little holiday and I should eat up quickly or my food would get cold.

The ‘holiday’ continued indefinitely and my mother didn’t return. No one explained what was going on. I didn’t ask about her again. I’d realised they didn’t want to talk about it. Occasionally my grandmother, especially after sampling the home-made apricot brandy, would stroke my hair and call me a poor motherless child. I wanted to point out I wasn’t motherless. I had a mother but she’d gone on this mysterious holiday. Later I wondered if she was dead but there had been no signs of the usual fuss around funerals. Dad hadn’t got out his black tie. Grandma hadn’t unearthed her rusty black velvet dress. No single flower in a vase stood before the portrait photograph of my mother which had perched on the mantelpiece. That picture disappeared altogether. What happened to it, I wonder. Did my father destroy it in anger or keep it hidden away in sorrow? It wasn’t among his effects when Grandma and I parcelled them up after he died. Or perhaps it was, and Grandma abstracted it before I saw it, still afraid of having to make explanations.

Neither during my childhood nor when I grew older did either of them come out and admit the truth that she’d bolted from the family home. I had to work that out for myself. I never knew why she’d done it and, in the early years, wondered why she hadn’t taken me with her. Years later, when I did meet up with her again, I didn’t ask her. You see, by then I was an adult and I, too, had learned to be wary of explanations. Nor did she offer any reason for having abandoned us, so the conspiracy of silence was complete.

They’re all dead now, Dad, Grandma and my mother. There’s a black hole left in my personal history.

Back to Lisa. Although I suspected, for the reasons given, she might not have told her parents everything, it would appear she’d been confiding in her dogged if incompetent neighbour. That was unsettling.

It was getting late now and I had eaten nothing all day except the tuna sandwich at Paddington and a couple of chocolate biscuits with Beryl. I decided to assume I wouldn’t encounter the Stallards’ self-appointed guardian and to go out to eat. He’d cleared off, thank goodness. I found a wine bar which did meals and ate a Greek salad with garlic bread. I felt better after that and as it was still light I went for a walk.

On Magdalen Bridge I leaned over the graceful parapet and stared down at the water below lapping against the moored punts. I thought of the bridge over the canal at Camden Lock and felt homesick for the crowded London streets and skyline. I thought of Hari, who distrusted punts, and, looking at them, I was inclined to agree with him. Who in his right mind would take to the river on an extended tea tray? I thought of Ganesh, whose wise words I needed but couldn’t have now. It was too late to ring the shop and what could I do if he told me, as he surely would, to get the first London train in the morning?

By now it was about ten p.m. but there were still plenty of people about in the area of the Plain when I crossed it on my way back to the guest house. It was dark and lights had come on in houses. There seemed to be a lot of bicycles propped against walls. At the guest house there were no lights except from the basement flat where Beryl had her private quarters. My key let me into a silent hallway. The poodle didn’t show itself. I could hear the soft murmur of voices drifting up the narrow twisting staircase which led down to the basement flat. Perhaps Beryl was listening to the television. The voices broke off and someone, a man, laughed. A female voice joined in. It sounded a lot like Beryl. Not television but a gentleman visitor.

In the hall was a payphone and on a shelf beneath an Oxford area telephone book. I took the opportunity of being alone to look up the Stallards’ number and make a note of it. Then I went quietly up to bed.

I couldn’t sleep. I switched on the bedside light and read the tourist leaflets. After a while I heard someone else enter the house and footsteps on the stairs and in the upstairs hallway. There was a soft whisper of American voices. Some of my fellow guests had come back. Then it was quiet except for the distant noise of a car circling the Plain and gathering speed along the Iffley Road. Once I thought I heard the poodle yap and found myself thinking of Beryl and how she must have removed her false limb to go to bed. I wondered if she was sharing her couch with her male visitor and if the missing lower limb bothered him. Presumably not. Or perhaps, because there are some strange people out there, he even found the absence of the limb fascinating, a sexual turn-on. Then I wondered how Jennifer Stallard managed to get Paul to bed and if they had any kind of outside help. There is more than one kind of lameness. I was crippled in my actions, unable to decide for myself what I wanted to do, and obliged to take direction from others.

I swung my legs over the side of the bed and took a turn up and down the room, trying to work off my restlessness. My feet took me to the window where I drew back the curtain and peered out.

The weather was clear with no suggestion of rain at hand, despite one or two clouds scudding about, creating darker patches like ink splotches against the cobalt blue of the city night sky. I could see the whole length of the garden and just discern the little door in the wall at the far end. The moonlight bathed everything in silvery grey and stroked plant pots and flagstones with ghostly fingers. The shrubs appeared as bold shapes but I couldn’t make them out in any detail. Above the rear wall was a lighter fluorescent glow which came from street lighting. As I watched I fancied a shadow moved against that wall, beneath its canopy of creeping wisteria. I pressed my eyes shut and then opened them to stare harder, trying to focus on the spot. But I didn’t see a repeat of that tiny disturbance in the still garden scene.

Perhaps, I told myself, it was just a night breeze rustling the foliage of the wisteria or a marauding cat. It could even be a fox. They ventured into the cities these days. Often, returning home late at night in London, I had surprised some unidentified beastie and been fleetingly aware of small shining eyes before their owner fled. The night only ever appears to be empty. I remembered Grandma Varady persuading me that cats and shadows and night birds were nothing to be afraid of, as I lay in my infant bed spooked by the cry of an owl outside or an unexplained rustle and tap at the window pane, and believing myself besieged by monsters. It took only a little effort of the imagination to see them out there, prowling around. It suddenly occurred to me that I was probably more visible at my window to any creature outside than anything lurking out there would be visible to me. The light from my bedside lamp shone behind me, silhouetting me nicely and revealing details of my room. It made me uneasy although I told myself there was no one there to care. I let the curtain fall, padded back to bed and scrambled in, suddenly grateful for the lingering warmth from my own body on the sheets.

I switched out the light and lay back, listening and dozing in fitful spurts. My brief brush with nature had alerted my senses. At night sounds are magnified and this was quite an old house. Wood moves in changing temperatures, old floorboards creak, window and door frames settle, there are a hundred different kinds of rustle, rattle, crack and groan. When these houses were built each bedroom was given a fireplace. Up in that chimney, now blocked off, birds were probably roosting and as they shuffled about in their sleep they disturbed ancient soot which showered down in soft explosions of pattering grime.

I wasn’t the only person who was awake at this late hour. Above my head must be an attic bedroom. Someone moved about up there. Among the other creaks I distinguished the regular pressure of footfalls. Now that I strained my ears, I made out the faint background noise of voices from a television set. Whoever it was, was a night bird of the human variety. It was oddly comforting to think I had companionship, of a sort, in the small hours of the night. Was I hearing the remaining guest, the travelling rep? I doubted it. That couldn’t be much of a room up there. If the business rep wasn’t the male visitor who might or might not be bedded down with Beryl, then I guessed he had been given the large bow-fronted bedroom at the front of the building.

I made an effort to put all these things from my mind. Perhaps, I told myself as I finally drifted into proper sleep, things will go better tomorrow. There’s always a first time.

Chapter Four

It’s odd waking up in a strange place. In the end I had slept like a log, despite all my worries and my brief midnight watch from the window. I opened my eyes, wondering briefly where I was. My eyes focused on the awful picture of the crying child and I remembered.

I got out of bed and cautiously stuck my head through the door. I had no dressing gown and the baggy old T-shirt which serves me as nightwear is only just about decent. But there was no one in view. Other guests, it seemed, were up and about before me. The bathroom door stood open. I nipped across.

When I made my way downstairs later the hall was empty, but from the foot of the stairs I could hear American voices drifting through the open breakfast-room door. More sound of activity came from the direction of the kitchen behind me and, before I could join the others, a small chunky girl with a mop of untidy dark hair shot out, fixed me with a challenging eye, and asked in a heavy accent, ‘Full English?’

‘What?’ I said, taken aback. I didn’t know by what radar she’d known I was there.

‘Do you want full English breakfast?’ she repeated impatiently and in a louder voice. ‘Or Continental?’

‘Full English, please,’ I told her.

‘Be with you in a couple of ticks.’ Having delivered herself of this unexpected colloquialism, she disappeared back into the kitchen.

I carried on into the breakfast room. The couple there stopped talking, looked up, smiled and bid me good morning.

I returned the greeting and they resumed their conversation. They were arguing about where to go that day. The girl was round-faced, curly-haired and had a kind of small-town respectability about her. She was for getting a bus to Woodstock to see Blenheim Palace. The boy, studious and bespectacled, hair brushed straight back like a budding White House spokesman, was for leaving that until later in the week. He wanted to take the Bodleian Library tour. He would.

The power-pack waitress erupted through the door and put a plate in front of me. It was laden with bacon, sausage, mushrooms, egg, tomato and, oh joy, fried bread.

‘There is not the black pudding today, I am sorry,’ she said.

‘This will be fine!’ I assured her.

‘Toast? Brown or white?’

‘Brown, please.’